St Louis At 45RPM

Rebellious Jukebox XLVIII: Posture vs Grimace & Figure

Music in the 90’s was pretty terrible. I was there, man. I gotta tell you, though, the stuff that was worth living for was totally worth living for. There was this underground movement of noisy guitar bands bands that made everything okay (I mean, there was some brilliant hip-hop & the beginnings of electronica too, of course, but let’s just talk about stuff that I knew about, okay?). If Posture had been around then, I would have put a song from their new 7″ on every mix tape I made.

I guess you could call Posture’s sound “shoegaze,” but that generally calls to mind reverb & chorus pedals & clean tones alternated with distorted clean tones, & it sounds like Posture mostly just use whatever dirty-ass sound is coming out of their amps to make their underlining drone. It’s fuzzy, but super organically fuzzy. Their new 7″ (labeled as a 45, but actually meant to be spun at 33, oh well) has four songs that remind me of all sorts of great lost bands that I bought records from (Little Switzerland? Anybody remember Little Switzerland? Anybody?). They open with a two chord instrumental that has all sorts of Wedding Present in it, then roam around through Velocity Girl & Whorl territory (Anybody remember Whorl? Anybody?). I have zero idea of what any of the lyrics are, but who cares? Sometimes the dude sings, sometimes the gal sings, it’s all cool. Highly recommended if you like fuzzy Slumberland Records-ish noise pop. Highly recommended!

Back back in the long ago, in the actual 90’s, there weren’t all that many bands in the punk scene working this sort of territory. Not in St Louis, at least. Luckily, the far distant suburbs supplied us with bands like Figure & Grimace. They released a split record into the post-Cap’n Jazz/pre-Emo void, then pretty much immediately broke up. The singer of Grimace moved up to Chicago, eventually forming weird post-rock powerhouse 90 Day Men, so that’s pretty cool. The songs are solid, with slightly odd guitar noodlings & barked out vocals about, y’know, whatever. The two bands are honestly kind of interchangeable (I had to doublecheck Discogs to be sure which band had the 90 Day Men guy), but they both stand solidly in the pack of pretty good mid-90’s indie punk. None of it wallows too deeply in weirdness for weirdness’s sake, nor whines for whining’s sake. I vaguely recall that there was a little bit of backlash at the time against these “county” bands from the “real” punks of the city, but that would be as annoying to talk about as typing all of those quotation marks just was.